There’s been a lot of choking in the nascent days of commercial cannabis growing in Santa Barbara County, especially as white-tented, periodically pungent farms expanded into the heart of wine country. As repeatedly covered in both this newspaper and much larger publications, this 21st-century cultivation conflict triggered lawsuits, contentious county hearings, and no shortage of seemingly endless squabbling, much of it between grape and cannabis growers themselves.
It’s curious, then, that the very same things that drew winemakers to Santa Barbara County — the unique, maritime-chilled microclimatic conditions afforded by our east-to-west lying Transverse Ranges — are also what make growing cannabis here so ideal. Much like in wine grapes, the diurnal temperature shifts between warm, sunny days and cool, sea-breezed nights allow strong cannabis growth during the day and ample resting at night.
But the similarities between the two industries go much deeper, say cannabis proponents. They believe that marijuana also exhibits the wine country notion of terroir, or how a farmed product’s characteristics reflect where it was grown; they find direct tourism parallels between visiting estates to enjoy the fruits, or buds, of those properties on-site; and they see the wine industry as a model for how to talk about cannabis in cultured ways, a potential roadmap for establishing an accepted vocabulary describing aromas, flavors, and farm-to-table techniques.
